Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

September 04, 2015

I had high hopes when I first saw news of the CharacTour database. They say of themselves "We want to be your virtual tour guide to the world of characters so you can find a new favorite movie, TV show, book, video game, or webcomic." Perhaps it's unfair, but I was hoping for rather more on the side of books, but the emphasis is very much on movies. However, having got that out of the way, it's not a bad search tool at all. You can search for people by name, by profession (librarian is not listed however!), location, time period, ethnicity and so on. Once you have located the character that interests you the site provides a good profile, which is spoiler free, suggestions of other similar characters, where you can find the character (books and movies for example), related characters and user generated comments.

It gets interesting when you search for real people, who shouldn't in theory be in the database, but they are. So Jane Austen gets her own mention, since she's a character in a movie but there's also a list of other key characters created by her.

The database is still very small, some 45,000 characters. Consequently there are lots of gaps; Elizabeth Bennet is only to be found in one movie and one book for example. However, this is balanced by the great deal of amusing stuff that is to be found - you can match yourself against different characters by taking a quiz. (Unfortunately I have no idea who the top half dozen matches I got, since I'm not really into modern teenage culture!) You can get quotes, rankings for funny things such as 'characters who we would trust to avenge our death' and so on.

This tool is going to appeal to librarians who get asked about movies, characters, 'oh, can't remember their name but they were in so and so film' etc. Hopefully as more data gets added the resource will become ever more useful, and once it's got a lot of fictional characters in it, hopefully it will really take off.

Google has added in a new 'feature' into its range of search options. If you type fun facts into the search box the search engine will pop up some random fact to interest and entertain you. Here's an example:

You can click on 'Ask another question' and the prompt in the search box returns I'm feeling curious or you could just type that into the search box in the first place. Hit enter and you'll get another fun fact to amuse and entertain you.

OK, that's what it does, and quite frankly, is it too much to ask that Google engineers actually spend their time doing USEFUL stuff with search options, rather than messing around with stupid little jokes? This isn't the first time that Google has done this - previous offerings (which don't work now) are I'm feeling wonderful, I'm feeling stellar, I'm feeling doodly. I wonder if they could run one which worked if you typed in I'm sick of stupid Google jokes?

September 02, 2015

If you take a look at the Google home page you're in for a bit of a surprise, because they have changed their logo. The old and the new are below:

The company has always used a serif wordmark in the past, but this has now given way to an entirely new font of their own making. The idea behind it is to update the logo to work on smaller devices, such as a watch. It scales much better than the old version, even down into tiny font size. They have also produced an animated version, just using the G and dots. When you're running your search the dots move around, so that you have an indication that something is actually happening.

Do we like it? We don't really have a choice because the decision is made. However, after seeing it for 20 times or more you probably won't even notice it.